Limbo and Limmynade have joined forces, and will continue development together as Liftoff!

The past couple of weeks have been tremendously exciting times for all of us as events elsewhere have led to a massive growth in interest in and usage of Lemmy.

Our two separate projects both started with the intention of bringing an existing open-source code base Lemmur up to date, with the aim of helping new users to have a great first experience of Lemmy, while giving existing users access to many rich features. As soon as we became aware of each other we realised that we would work much more effectively by combining our efforts. Read more about what makes Liftoff! special.

We are:

Zach—Extensive experience in Enterprise full stack architecture and infrastructure.

Michael—Many years experience of developing and managing commercial and open source software projects.

Liftoff! is written in Dart for API support and Flutter for front-end development, meaning that it can run wherever Flutter runs. Our primary targets right now are Android and iOS, but the sky’s the limit!

Our current development priorities are to:

  • Ensure that the app runs robustly on iOS and Android platforms.
  • Identify and address any major bugs affecting key functionality
  • Work to improve the user experience on both platforms.
  • Release 1.0 version

Beta builds now available on TestFlight and will soon be available on F-Play and Google Store. (Note that the TestFlight page still refers to it as Limbo, but it does indeed install as Liftoff!)

Liftoff code is made available under GPL2.0 and can be found at https://github.com/liftoff-app

We have already had tremendous support from enthusiastic Lemmy users as separate projects and we look forward to continuing to work with you all. Code contributions, bug fixes, issue reports and suggestions are all welcome, so please join us on our journey into the unknown!

  • @liftoffOPM
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    311 months ago

    Could you explain what you mean by that request? Happy to log it but I don’t send much time on Android so I don’t understand it :-)

    • @DustyNipples
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      311 months ago

      Sorry, I didn’t see your reply till now.

      Gesture navigation on Android features a small black bar at the bottom of the screen, it’s transparent (like iOS) most of the time but devs specifically have to account for it, either make it a specific colour or transparent or it just appears black, which is quite ugly when the surrounding app is white or any other colour.

      Some manufacturers like Samsung allow you to remove the bar completely, but on others including Pixel there is no option.

      https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/166478545 - as you can see, lots of people have issues!

      Android 14 beta has a transparent nav bar option (currently only sort of working) so hopefully this will be one less thing for devs to worry about in the future.

      Thanks for your work on this app, it’s fab!

        • @DustyNipples
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          111 months ago

          Amazing, thanks.

          I have noticed that in v0.9.18 that the bar appears white in the main feed but reverts to black when going to any other tab.

    • Eleu8erios
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      111 months ago

      Guess have to do with the blueish color of navigation bar at the bottom. Would be better if we could customize it. Kudos to devs!